If it makes any difference to anyone, here’s why I’m voting one way in the EU referendum today.

My grandparents grew up like many of us after a giant banking crisis no one predicted. Radical left and right wing parties started doing well in elections across Europe in the 1930s, saying mainstream politics had failed and blaming greedy bankers, immigrants and other countries for their problems.

The mainstream parties caved in or lost power, and European countries began to say up yours to each other. No to foreign goods, foreign firms, foreign workers, ‘foreign’ ethnic minorities who had lived there for centuries. They fell into a tit for tat trade war blocking each other’s products, and trade between them collapsed.

That, and most governments’ refusal to invest, bankrupted countless businesses and turned a banking crisis into the decade-long Great Depression. The 1930s is called the ‘hungry thirties’ because millions starved and suffered in miserable conditions.

Desperate people called for desperate measures, and gave into extreme politicians promising to solve all their woes and restore national pride. Then the economic war became a military one, and even more people suffered unimaginably in one of the worst wars in human history. Many blame Hitler alone for Europe’s ruin, but he was a symptom as well as a cause."

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EU referendum day need to know

When the war finally ended people elected leaders across broken and bankrupted Europe who said screw that. Never again. No to division, and the hatred, economic devastation and human tragedies it caused. Yes to cooperation, unity and openness among relative equals, to arguing out inevitable rows through diplomacy and political debate rather than military or economic war, and to setting up the institutions, relationships and trade deals needed to make it happen.

Here’s what happened. Europe had decades of phenomenal economic growth with booming trade between countries, near full employment and wages doubling at home, and war shifting from a lived reality to the something unimaginable.

Yes, things haven’t been rosy and Europe has changed in ways some of us don’t like since the 1970s. Most economies hit domestic problems in the 70s, and the EU moved to the right politically after most countries did. Most politicians got carried away after the end of the Cold War, and thought letting in eastern Europe would help us and ex-Soviet states live happily ever after. Most countries suffered after the recent banking crisis, and the EU has pushed more integration as the answer.

But the fundamentals are the same. We are still a continent at peace, trading openly and successfully with each other, arguing things out rather than attacking each other’s people and businesses. The fact war seems unthinkable only shows how successful the generations before us have been in making it unthinkable. It was just as unthinkable in the 1910s, and in the 1930s. And this decade looks worryingly like the 1930s.

I haven’t made this up. This is where Europe comes from, why it exists and why it’s no less important today. Vote how you like, but please don’t forget that history.

There’s nothing inevitable about peace and cross-European cooperation on trade, migration, terror, human rights, the environment, everything - people made it happen, and people can tear it apart. Ask your grandparents.